


Noctambulisms

by Perfunctorily



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Babies, Character Study, Children, Gen, Motherhood, Pre-Canon, i guess?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-27
Updated: 2019-02-27
Packaged: 2019-11-06 15:43:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,490
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17942534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Perfunctorily/pseuds/Perfunctorily
Summary: 'Surely he cannot cry all night,' she thinks with exasperation.Jon Snow gives every sign that he intends to cry all night.Catelyn remembers then that there is no wet nurse to see to the baby, the latest had left the previous afternoon, like the one that had begged off only a fortnight before her, and the one before that as well.Jon Snow’s nursemaids come and go like mayflies. Few last more than a moon’s turn in Winterfell and Cat knows it’s because of her.____________________Two times Catelyn Stark finds herself looking in on her husband's bastard at night.





	Noctambulisms

There is a baby crying somewhere. 

She does not wake, so much as her flimsy little boat of sleep capsizes and unceremoniously dumps her into the cold waters of consciousness. The sound of a squalling infant tugs at something so deep and intrinsic to her that she wonders how anyone in the whole of the North can sleep while Robb wails. 

Catelyn is seventeen and the lady of a great house. Robb is teething, and always hungry, and she is so exhausted she could sob. Her breasts ache, and she cannot be entirely sure that she has slept more than an hour at a stretch since she came to the North. Sometimes, walking around WInterfell so bundled up she can barely move her arms, she feels like nothing more than a child, and sometimes she feels so old she might die. She’s never done this before and she is so, so tired. 

Half a moment of wishing she were still asleep, and she’s tossed the furs aside and put her bare feet to the stone floor. Not cold, thank the Seven, the floor is always warm in her new rooms, the water from the springs beneath the castle leeching heat through the stone. She’s halfway across the room to his crib before she realizes that the heir to the North is fast asleep. 

In the shadows of her room, she can just make out the soft curve of his head, the dandelion dusting of hair just visible under the flannel and fur of the swaddling. Her exhaustion seems to vanish, she can’t help but reach out to brush her fingers – gently, ever so gently, lest he wake – over his little head, the hair had been so fine and pale when he was born, only now is it starting to come over auburn, like hers. He’s warm and safe, her sweet boy, her Robb. 

But a baby is still crying somewhere in the castle.

Her heart grows colder. There are only two newborn babes in Winterfell. 

Cat resolves to go back to bed. A wet nurse will take care of it. She settles herself back among the furs, her nightdress drawn tight around her. She waits. The babe cries. 

His wails are not much like Robb’s. As cheerful and inquisitive a baby as Robb can be, big blue eyes enchanting even the sternest of old maids and guardsmen, when he has a mind to cry, he squalls and screams and oft has half the servants peeking in on her to see if the two of them are quite alright. She is reduced to tears herself half the time trying to quiet him. But the other babe’s sobs start and stop, a few minutes of silence, then a few of wailing more plaintive than demanding.

Like some small animal crying out in the snow.

Feeling a chill, she pulls the furs close over her. Only moments later she throws them off again when she finds herself too hot. Down the hallway, in the nursery, the infant weeps, then quiets, and then weeps some more. Cat clutches a pillow to her chest during a moment of peace, then puts it over her head when he starts up again. _Surely he cannot cry all night,_ she thinks with exasperation. 

Jon Snow gives every sign that he intends to cry all night. 

Catelyn remembers then that there is no wet nurse to see to the baby, the latest had left the previous afternoon, like the one that had begged off only a fortnight before her, and the one before that as well. 

Jon Snow’s nursemaids come and go like mayflies. Few last more than a moon’s turn in Winterfell and Cat knows it’s because of her. It’s certainly not because of the boy. By all accounts he is a quiet, sweet child, taking the breast easily and seldom crying for attention. 

The nurses are almost all older than Catelyn, and yet they shrink and wither away under her gaze. She knows she looks at them dead eyed and cold and she swears she is not bitter enough to do it on purpose. It’s very strange to be Lady Stark, and have grown women cringe from her gaze. 

The last woman had been over thirty, and kindly, big of breast and good with the babes. Cat had been frayed to no end trying to get Robb to suck when he was in a mood, and the nurse had put Snow down and reached for him, exclaiming that she understood the trouble, twins could be so difficult, her own girls at home had come only hours apart. Cat had snatched Robb away from her and _snarled_. The woman was gone before sunset. 

Cat closes her eyes against the stab of guilt. Jon snow cries on.

She wishes Ned were here. He’s is always away, dining with some hill tribesmen or at table with some bannerman. They issue invitations like challenges, each of them demanding this or that. An extra league of land, a tax lightened, a son fostered, a daughter wedded. It seems that, to a man of them, the Lords of the North want to test him. Ned is not Brandon, who they expected to bend the knee to, but some green boy who spent half his life in the Vale.

Ned, who brought home this other woman’s child and left her with it, who is not Brandon, that she had expected to wed. 

She can’t hate him for it. 

The boy though, she can hardly help but resent. 

After perhaps an hour of his fits and starts, she fears his cries might wake Robb. The nursery is not far from her room, and her son sleeps so lightly. The thought of having to pace up and down the halls rocking him back to sleep for the rest of the night gets her back out of the bed. 

She’ll fetch a maid to feed the bastard again, or change him, or whatever it is he wants, if only so she might get back to sleep before dawn. 

But the servants’ quarters are so far away, She doesn’t like to trouble them, they look at her like a silly southern girl, too green to know what to do with herself here. Balancing ledgers and caring for Robb take all her time, She’s become fast friends with Poole, the steward, but she thinks she catches the staff giggling at her. It would be a great deal of trouble to go down to the scullery to fetch someone, her feet are so cold in the hallway, and she must pass the nursery in any case.

Outside the door, it is even more apparent that the cries were never so very loud as that. Her ear has become so sharply attuned to Robb’s sounds that, if a babe cried out in the winter town, she very well might have woken. The distressed noises rip at her heart, even if he is not her child, even if she hates the boy, she can’t just let him cry.

Cat puts a hand to the cold wood of the door, hesitates a moment, and pulls it open. 

The crying continues. And there is Ned Stark’s bastard: a small bundle of cloth and a puff of dark hair in a cradle, alone in a cold, dark room. He’s worked a hand out of his swaddling, but isn’t sucking the thumb, he scrubs his fat little hand across his face, soothing himself. 

Catelyn refuses to feel a bit of sympathy for the fact he’s learned to do that, this is not his first night spent alone. Though there is no shortage of new mothers in the North, and they flock eagerly to Winterfell with the news that the young Lord Stark has a suckling babe in need of milk, it takes time to find a new one and get her established in the nursery. It’s been a hard winter, the North lost many men to Targaryen swords, and more girls are needed on their farmsteads than can be spared to nurse highborn babes. 

She knows just what has upset the boy: it’s cold. Someone, likely the maid that fed him his supper of goat’s milk and put him to bed, had left the brazier in the corner open too far, and the flame had guttered out in a draft, the coals gone cold.  Normally a nurse would sleep in the room to watch him, but unlike Robb, Snow usually sleeps through the night, and the maid must have gone back down to the scullery, sure the boy would not need tending until morning, when they might procure another nursing mother for him. 

Unsure of what else to do, loath to touch him though she might be, she lifts up the whimpering babe and rests him on her shoulder. It almost surprises her how easy it is to pick him up. Somehow she expected it to be forbidden to lay hands on him. The meaningful looks Ned gives her every time he leaves, the unspoken warning,  _He will be here when I return. T_ here is no ‘or else’ there, She dares not consider it. She would not hurt a child, he cannot think it of her, she cannot think it of herself.

Still, it surprises her when the babe turns his wet face to her neck and quiets almost instantly. Only a few more fussing whines, a hiccuping sniffle, and he puts his thumb in his mouth, comforted, as though she were his mother. She does not look him in his big grey eyes, though they study her. She bounces him gently, the movement automatic.

“Shush now, no need to cry.” 

It is a wonder how small and delicate he is. This thing that brings her so much pain with the simple fact of being alive, and here. 

She shivers. It really is cold in the nursery. She supposes he can be no more used to the cold of Winterfell than she and Robb are. He was born somewhere south. Dorne, some say. Catelyn has not dared to count back months to guess who and how and when and where. 

Even so, she can’t shake the dread that he was born before Robb. A bastard is dangerous, but an elder bastard is mortal peril for an heir. _Twins can be so difficult_ , the nurse had said. 

Sudden revulsion fills her. She holds Jon Snow away from her. Startled, he gives a gurgle that threatens to turn into a whine. His eyes are so big. Grey eyes, Ned’s eyes. looking at her, trusting, not a hint of fear in them. _No one has ever been cruel to him_ , she thinks. _I would not hurt a child,_ she thinks. _What if he were a threat to Robb?_ she thinks.

She puts the babe back in his bed, and fetches a servant to start the brazier. 

She sleeps the rest of the night with Robb in her arms.

 

* * *

 

Thunder wakes her from a deep and tired sleep. It hangs thickly on her, dulling her mind and heavying her limbs. 

She listens for the crying of a babe, but Arya had started sleeping well in the nursery a month hence, growing fast and fearless, and Sansa, now two, had always slept like the dead, Seven bless her. 

It’s early spring, Catelyn is two and twenty, the Lady of a great house, and mother to three good, strong babes. 

When no crying accompanies the next clap of thunder, she lets her head fall back to the pillow. She won’t have to get out of bed just yet. It isn’t Arya and Sansa she should worry about, but Robb. 

Always a light sleeper, he still gets frightened by a thunderstorm. He tries to be brave for his father, and his sisters, but he’s not yet learned to quite overcome his fears. She hopes, privately, that he never does. She loves her sweet boy, and his gentle nature warms her heart. She’ll never truly grow tired of waking to his wide blue eyes asking if he can sleep with her because of the grumkins hiding in the shadows of his chamber.

He’d been sleeping in the nursery with Sansa up until Arya was born. Perhaps a little long, boys of five should be with brothers, but he has no trueborn brothers as of yet, and her doting has seemed to have no ill effects on him. She’d feared coddling might make him quiet and bookish, though Ned had been so as a child and grown up well enough, but she fears, always, she fears for her children. Robb, to his credit, gentle though he is, is also a vigorous boy, eager to impress Ned and play fight with the serving boys as he is to help little Sansa with her dolls or gently hold the baby. She cannot be more proud of him.

Even so, a room of his own is still daunting. His coming to her bedside with his fears has happened less and less of late, and Cat has been busy with the girls, but she expects he’ll come tonight. Old Nan likes telling scary stories too much for five year old lordlings to sleep through thunder this loud. 

She lies awake, waiting. More thunder comes, but Robb does not. 

It should be a relief, a sign of him growing out of such things, but she begins to worry. It’s a foolish, motherly worry, but it takes root all the same. Robb is so sensitive to his need to grow up fast. Perhaps he is terrified, but even more scared that she might refuse him. She had, only the other day at supper said that he was a big boy now and too old to be scared of ghosts when he’d said something about being frightened of the crypts.

He and Jon Snow always made a game of daring each other to go down into the dark. She knows this because she still watches their play as sharply as she can – distracted with baby girls as she is – always with the silent fear that one day the bastard will turn on him. Even years on now, she still can’t shake it. There are few things in the world that might hurt Robb, and Jon Snow is paramount among them. But he’s given her no cause to worry yet. Much the opposite, He sticks to Robb like a shadow, dogging his heels and watching with eager grey eyes that even she can’t miss the naked adoration in. 

The pair of them traipse around the castle near attached at the hip, bouncing after Ned’s young squire Jory, or bothering pot boys and stable hands. Even she has to admit, Robb is always at his cheeriest when beside his bastard brother, and for that, she can’t hate the boy.

When she came to Winterfell, only five years ago – though it feels like a lifetime – it had felt a cold, empty place. Now children seem to fill the castle half to bursting. 

She knows. on some level that there were always pageboys, squires, and maids, and that there are always more young folk about as winter relinquishes it’s grasp. But her heart feels warm when she looks out a window and sees boys shouting and running in the yard, where before it seemed that the snow was seldom marred by footsteps. It feels like Riverrun did, when Edmure was a rowdy child and she, Petyr and Lysa would mind him. Robb is the very image of her brother at that age, and that too warms her.

Perhaps it is just that she has settled into her role. She is Lady Stark, she has her Ned, her dear Ned who does not have to leave so often now that he is established as Lord Paramount. Brandon is but a memory, a fondly grieved brother, not a shadow to stand in or larger boots to fill.

A particularly vicious roll of thunder seems to shake the castle down to it’s foundations, a dog barks somewhere, and she decides she should look in on the children.

The nursery is quiet, girls’ toys strewn about. Arya sound asleep in her crib, and Sansa snoozing away in a little bed, her favorite doll clutched tight. All seems right in their small, soft world.

Robb’s room is further away, a staircase down, but she makes the trip, feet cold against the stone. Cat curses herself for forgetting shoes. The warm floor of her chamber spoils her so. 

Robb’s room, to her horror, lies empty. 

He simply isn’t there. She gapes in the doorway, staring at the empty bed. She would have found him in the hallway or on the stairs if he were on his way to her. There is only the one way up to her chamber unless one uses the servant’s stairs. He would never run to Ned’s rooms. Gentle and loving as Ned is, Robb wants his father to see him as brave and grown up.

A frantic terror seizes her heart, she wants to scream, to call the guards, to go tearing through the castle to find him. But her reason has not quite left her yet. The scream dies before it even reaches the back of her throat.

There’s one more place to check for him. 

Jon Snow’s room is further still, in a different tower altogether. He sleeps in a squire’s room, which is well appointed enough. The boy cannot lack for comfort. No rooms in Winterfell are particularly poorly placed, or lacking in space or insulation. 

She thinks, when she ever thinks of his comfort, that it can’t be terrible for him to be surrounded by other boys, even if they are all older than him. The smallfolk that work in the castle all like him well enough, to be sure. She’s seen him be sent from the dairy – where little boys should not play, though she knows a case of milkpox for Robb would be good, preventing a deadly pox later in life, but a dairy is no place for menfolk, and the dirt from playing boys could turn a whole month's worth of butter before it's churned – with honeyed buttermilk and a pat on the head, not chased out with a swat from a broom. None had ever caught the bastard stealing.

He’d grown into a serious, shy child that clung to Old Nan’s skirts and looked to Ned for a nod of permission before doing much of anything that Robb did not do first. She does her best not to notice him, when he isn’t with her son.

It’s not too long before she finds herself in the hall outside his chamber. She’s never had occasion to visit this room before, and her hand hesitates on the cold wood of the door.

_If Robb is not in there, and the boy is awake, perhaps startled by the thunder, what will I say_? She can hardly be caught spying on her husband’s bastard son. What reason could the Lady of Winterfell have in looking in on the five year old boy she does everything in her power to ignore? 

But she has to know. She cannot simply go back to her bed, knowing Robb isn’t safely abed in his own room. 

The door is hung well, and does not creak when she pulls it open. A soft shaft of light from her candle falls across the bed, and sure enough, there are two lumps under the furs. Raising the candle, she can see their heads, only just. Robb is wrapped around his half brother, turned away from the door, naught but an elbow and a tangle of curls to be seen, tucked beneath the bastard’s chin. Even from the door, she can see the gentle curl of a smile on Snow’s sleeping face, Ned’s face.

She wants to tear Robb from the bed, clutch him to her, get him away from the boy that represents everything in the world that poses a threat to him. _I would not hurt a child,_ she remembers thinking, years ago.

She closes the door silently and is well away from the room before she makes a sound. It is not a sob, but some kind of moan. She braces herself against a wall. How can it hurt her so, something as small and delicate as a boy’s innocent smile while he slept beside his brother?

_I cannot be jealous of a little boy. I am Lady Stark, I am a grown woman,_ the thought is leaden with shame. And yet, her heart aches. 

She goes back up to the nursery, barely feeling the cold of the stone beneath her feet. and takes Sansa to bed with her. The girl does not complain, cuddling readily into her mother’s embrace. With her daughter in her arms, Catelyn sleeps through the rest of the night, despite the thunder.

**Author's Note:**

> I don't really know where this one came from but I had to get it written. I love both Cat and Jon a lot, and think the hurt they cause each other is tragic, but no real fault of either of them.


End file.
